CHAPTER III. SOME DERIVATIVE NOTIONS

SECTION

I. The Primordial Nature of GodThe aspect of God that exists independently of the world, containing all possibilities.; Relevance and the Divine Ordering; the Consequent Nature of GodThe aspect of God that evolves alongside the world, feeling and preserving every event.; Creativity and how it acquires character; Creatures, Objective ImmortalityThe way a finished moment of experience continues to exist by influencing future moments., AppetitionA fundamental urge or "striving" toward a goal or possibility., Novelty, and Relevance; Appetition and Mentality; Conceptual PrehensionsThe way an entity "grasps" or incorporates an abstract idea into its own experience., Pure and Impure Prehensions; Synonyms and analogies, namely Conceptual Prehension, Appetition, Intuition, Physical Purpose, Vision, and Envisagement.
II. Social Order, Defining Characteristics, and Substantial FormThe essential nature or structure that makes a thing what it is.; Personal Order, Serial Inheritance, and the Enduring Object; Corpuscular SocietiesGroups of individual entities that work together, such as a physical object made of atoms..
III. The classic notion of Time and its single sequence; the continuity of "becoming" versus the "becoming" of continuity; the paradoxes of ZenoZeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher whose paradoxes questioned whether motion and time were continuous or made of tiny, indivisible steps.; Atomism and Continuity; Particle and Wave theories of light.
IV. Consciousness, Thought, and Sense-Perception are not essential elements in every instance of experience.

CHAPTER I

SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY

SECTION I

This course of lectures is designed as an essay in Speculative Philosophy. Its first task must be to define "speculative philosophy" and to defend it as a method that produces important knowledge.

Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, and necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. By this notion of "interpretation," I mean that everything of which we are conscious—whether enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought—shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme. Thus, the philosophical scheme should be coherent, logical, and, in respect to its interpretation, applicable and adequate. Here, "applicable" means that some items of experience are interpretable in this way, and "adequate" means that there are no items incapable of such interpretation.